| | From | Linus Torvalds <> | | Date | Fri, 6 Aug 2010 11:40:15 -0700 | | Subject | Re: [GIT PATCH] TTY patches for 2.6.36 |
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On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de> wrote: > > This contains the big BKL removal of the tty layer, which has been > worked on now for a long time by Alan and Arnd.
Umm. No it doesn't.
It contains some crazy "BKL or mutex" choice layer, and the MUTEX choice is disabled unless you have EXPERIMENTAL set (and not the default even if it is set - but quite frankly, that doesn't matter, because asking about it is so fundamentally wrong in the first place that the whole default choice is totally meaningless).
That's just total and utter crud. Having a conditional BKL is _worse_ than just having the BKL. It's crazy. It's stupid, it limits testing, and it's pure idiocy. Whoever thought that was a good idea was not thinking at all.
Either the locking fixes are improvements, or they aren't. If they are improvements, they should be unconditionally enabled, and the old locking should have been removed. And if they aren't, it shouldn't have been merged at all. The timid kind of "let the user choose" choice is STUPID.
Dammit, if the developer doesn't know which one is better, how the hell is a user supposed to know? Answer: he isn't. Making it a config option is fundamentally wrong. Config options that ask questions that users cannot answer are WRONG. Really.
I'm not pulling crazy sh*t like this. The _only_ thing that kconfig option does is basically mean that it doesn't get the kind of coverage in testing that it needs to get, and it confuses everybody. Not to mention having two totally different code-paths where there should be only one.
Do do the highlander thing on that crud. Cut it off at the head, and make sure it never ever comes back to life.
Linus
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